We analyze the short and long run effects of demographic ageing - increased longevity and reduced fertility - on per-capita growth. The OLG model captures direct effects, working through adjustments in the savings rate, labor supply, and capital deepening, and indirect effects, working through...

The level of financial development is an important determinant of the performance of capital markets. We examine stock returns in a cross section of emerging and mature markets (49 countries) over 1980-99. Returns in financially underdeveloped countries have been somewhat lower, but...

We develop a general equilibrium model of vertical innovation in which multiple firms compete monopolistically in the quality space. The model features many firms, each of which holds the monopoly to produce a unique quality level of an otherwise homogenous good, and consumers who are...

We analyze the effect of changes in fertility and longevity on taxes, the composition of government spending, and productivity. To that purpose, we introduce politics in an OLG economy with endogenous growth due to human and physical capital accumulation. Population ageing shifts political power...

We analyze the effect of the projected demographic transition on the political support for social security, and equilibrium outcomes. Embedding a probabilistic-voting setup of electoral competition in the Diamond (1965) OLG model, we find that intergenerational transfers arise in the absence of...

This paper empirically examines the effect of population growth on real interest rates. Although this effect is well founded in macroeconomic theory, the corresponding empirical results have been rather tenuous. Demographic interest rate theories are typically based on long-term relationships...

Convenience and security are the two key attributes that consumers consider when choosing between payment technologies. We examine how consumers react to an exogenous change to the convenience and security of digital payments. We study an increase in the 'tap-and-go' limit for contactless...

We examine episodes of large gross FDI inflows - surges - at the sectoral level between 1994 and 2009 for 95 emerging-market and industrial countries. We find that surges in the primary and manufacturing sectors are less cyclical and associated with lower macroeconomic volatility than surges in...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850...

Does a country's ability to enforce debt contracts affect the sensitivity of economic activity to collateral values? To answer this question, we introduce a novel industry-specific measure of real asset redeployability - the ease with which real assets are transfered to alternative uses - as a...